Anyone can learn the rules of chess in an afternoon but it takes a lifetime to successfully march 20 wooden pieces across a 10 x 10 board with the skill of a conquering general.  Similarly, while a firm’s sales cycle can be neatly illustrated on a single sheet of letter-sized paper it takes years of human insight and heartbreak before a stranger will shake your hand for a million dollars, and why stop there when a billion is the new million?  This week we present five black diamonds that they don’t teach you at business school.  Are we inviting clients to a game of poker with a loaded deck or merely playing our cards to their legitimate limit?  As they say in your corporate ethics class: that is something that only you can decide.

• Whose Idea is It Anyway?
  Your prospect wants to spend a lot of money with you.  You’re sure of it.   You go for broke, you ask for the order… for next to nothing.  Your team looks at you in disbelief, your client is puzzled.  And then he argues, he argues passionately and vocally why he should buy the mother load.  Never forget it’s easier for our egos to write a big check for an idea that we think is our own.  Consequently, we can get people to do what we want by putting them in control, or at least giving them a carefully staged sense of control.
• Throwing Frank under the Bus
  Companies screw up. Sometimes screwing up is more cost effective than delivering, bordering on good business sense.  Especially when we can hold onto the client relationship and sign our next deal.  How so?  Mistakes happen – most clients are reasonable and as long as long as retribution is seen to play out then everyone moves happily on to the next deal.  If we can give the impression of tracking back and pinning the problem to a single employee then many client issues can be neatly resolved with a public lynching.  “We’re all terribly upset by Frank’s performance and are just as surprised as you; we have addressed this in his annual review and assure you it won’t happen again.”  Just be sure to look after our fall guy Frank and make it clear the public berating is merely a negotiation tactic and has nothing to do with his stellar performance. 
• Dress Like the Man You Want to Be
  Inflating your annual revenue figures will make you look like a big boy when responding to a tenders but it will also likely have your sharing a prison cell with Mr. Madoff in the current business environment.  However, beyond financial figures it’s pretty much all fair games.  To become the company you want to be, you’ve got to pitch like the company that you aspire to be or you’ll never win the deals that take you there.  Sales pitches by their very nature are aspirational.  Just be sure you can deliver on your promises or your pipe dreams will be short lived.  (And as for that pesky request for financial data: sometimes revenue projections are sufficient and for smaller companies, audited statements for the past 12 months might not yet be available, especially if it was a rough year).
• I’m Calling from Outside Your Office
  Agreeing to meet a new vendor can be a lot of pressure, especially if the supplier needs to fly a long way and your schedule look really busy next week.  Trouble is, if the vendor doesn’t fly a long way and meet you next week, there will be no deal. 
  Consequently the easiest way for me to get on your calendar is to schedule an informal introduction while I’m in town for another business meeting.  No expectations or commitment before I get on the plane – I’ll be there anyway.  Now just because I haven’t actually scheduled another meeting – that’s no reason for me to not reference this hypothetical get-together in your neck of the woods; it if it makes it easier for us to meet up then that’s good as it’s ultimately what we both want.  Besides, once you’ve agreed to meet, I will be a good salesman and contact other prospects in your neighborhood and mention that I just “happen to be in town.”
• The Witness Stand
  I’m always amazed at the weight buyers place on client references as a meaningful measure of a company’s ability to deliver.  Too often, references are provided by a client who joins their sales representative for the occasional four-course dinner and evening of basketball entertainment, consequently they may not be indicative of a typical working relationship. 
  Still the most rewarding moment of my career came when a West Coast client took a reference call from a British prospect, on her cell phone while picking out a turkey for the family’s Thank Giving dinner that night.  Sometimes clients know what they want, companies exceed expectations and incredible people are involved.  And that is something to shout about.  The most useful insight you can uncover from a reference call is tips for getting the most out of a company that you’ve already decided to start doing business with.  As a method for selecting the recipient of a check for $10 million dollars, it’s somewhat sketchy.

In conclusion a carefully written business plan will only get you so far in the real world; no successful enterprise was built without breaking a few egg shells along the way.  The trick is to avoid ending up as the egg shell in another man’s breakfast burrito.  And so in the interest of objectivity, we’ll take a look next week at how buyers can play hard ball too.

In the current economy, getting laid off is decidedly passé while handing in your notice implies a responsibility to look for future employment and contemplate life beyond the comfort of your carefully cultivated office cubicle.  No, the true bon vivant of today’s bellybutton gazing economy aspires to get fired – spectacularly.  Trouble is, if you can sell in a down market, jumping off the corporate ladder can be just as tricky for a sales rep as scaling its slippery rungs.  Fortunately, career seppuku is now within the easy reach of every sales professional, no matter how motivated they are. 

1.  Taking Liberties with the Company Expense Policy
You made enough cash last year to send your kids to Europe and put your mistress through Art School yet the temptation still burns every Friday night to expense that $6 beer after a particularly rough day in the office.  One man’s legitimate business expense is another man’s all paid visit to Score’s complete with steak dinner and 60 minutes of negotiation time in the champagne room.  If in doubt ask for a fully itemized bill after a night of raiding the hotel mini-bar on your next business trip and don’t forget to call internationally from the comfort and convenience of your hotel phone.

2.  Letting Your Valued Customers Know Exactly How You Feel
Being nice to everyone makes it difficult to express love to those whom we truly care about and can undermine our sense of being; in the immortalized words from the recently released Brother’s Bloom film “My day job requires me to feign interest in people all day long but understand, I am actually interested in you.”

If you’re planning on terminating your employment then there’s no better time to burn every business relationship in your rolodex.  “This email is to let you know that I have had respect for neither myself, you nor Polymex Building Supplies at any time during the past three years while serving as your valued industrial paint advisor.  I have found you continually difficult to work with and wish to express my deepest sympathies to your spouse.  You may be interested to know that it is actually possible to remove connections from LinkedIn.”

3.  Expressing Your True Self
Corporate America loves creativity as long as it stays within the confines of whether to sport a pink tie or go with tasseled loafers.  Regardless of the quality of your legal representation, cross-dressing is still frowned upon among field sales representatives (unless this was disclosed at the time of hiring in which case it’s all OK).  Other currently unacceptable lifestyle choices include politically motivated facial tattoos, joining the Hare Krishna’s and nudism during regular office hours.

4. DUI while Travelling in a Company Sponsored Vehicle
Believe it or not, getting ticketed for drunk driving while rolling in a company-sponsored vehicle is an instantly dismissible offense at most Fortune 500 firms.  As part of our research for this article we interviewed a prominent employment lawyer with an international technology sales force to get to the bottom of this surprising legal conundrum and were told “It just is, ok.  Don’t fuck with me, I went to Wharton.” So the rule of the story is, if you’re going to get trashed after closing a million dollar deal, be sure to park the hire car at the Holiday Inn and expense that taxi back to the airport.

5. Not Selling Anything
This is perhaps the trickiest way to get fired from any sales position and should only be attempted by those with a deep understanding of corporate politics and a graduate-level qualification from an AACSB accredited business school.  The problem arises from the difficulty associated with conclusively proving that someone hasn’t sold anything.  Consider the sad tale of Brian, a medical device sales representative based in New Jersey who was happily contemplating his imminent firing after missing his sales quota for a second consecutive quarter: 

“Remember that deal that Dave closed in California last week, well it turns out his prospect’s Mom’s chiropractor knew Brian’s dentist in New York – who knows what would have happened without Brian’s network, we better keep him on just in case.” 

There’s also the question of timing – sales people don’t get suddenly fired for poor performance, it’s more like six boy scouts taking turns to piss on a camp fire until the damn thing is finally out.  If you’re going to get dismissed for incompetence then you’ll need the commitment to not make any outbound phone calls nor answer any client emails for at least 6 months.  By that time, you may just want to keep your sales job anyway.

Dear Timothy,

Or should I say Yoda (LOL)!

We haven’t met but from reading your book, “The Four Hour Work Week”, I feel we have a spiritual connection that is bigger than the confines of my humble office cubicle. My co-workers are a little freaked out by the giant poster of you playing Irish Hurling that I’ve put up in the staff canteen and our inside-sales rep says I have a man-crush on you but I guess not everyone can be a lifestyles entrepreneur.

I’ve been trying my best to follow your sagely advice and think I am making real progress. Every morning I consume twice the recommended dose of your patented BrainQUICKEN nurtional formula and I find it really pumps me up (though I’m not sure if the gaseous side effects are normal).

I haven’t been able to quit my day job just yet but I’m getting there. I tried not reading email like you suggested in the book but had to abort the plan on my first day after my boss threatened to fire me by 11:30 am. He is totally uncool and trapped in the office life prison (though he does drive a nice BMW and I’m pretty certain he scored with that college intern last summer). However, for the 110 minutes when I was email free, it was totally cool though I wasn’t really sure what to do with the extra time as my job mostly involves responding to customer complaints via email.

I also took your advice and hired a virtual assistant in India to experience the empowerment of delegation. It was going pretty well until I realized my PA in Bangalore was also outsourcing his life and sub-contracting my tasks to an unemployed marketing major in Seattle. Totally not cool.

So I’ve been working really hard to find my muse. After much soul searching I realized her name is Jenna Jameson. Jenna is the only thing, I mean person that I’ve been able to get really excited about (other than your book and the online lifestyle empowerment community that you’ve built).

I’ve spent a lot of time researching Miss Jameson and consider myself a certified Jenna Genius! My plan is to create an educational DVD that walks guys like us through the basics of connecting with their idol from locating her home address via Social Security records to mapping where she hangs out in private. Like you suggested, I plan to charge $60 to reflect the premium nature of my product and to offer a 120% money back guarantee.

Once my automatic cash flow kicks in, I’m pumped about the big Quit Day and finally giving up the 9-5 office habit. I used to think achievement was all about who had the most money but now I realize it’s all about who has the longest, most exotic vacation.

After all the success I’m destined to experience through the “Four Hour Work Week”, I think it’s totally important to give something back. Originally I was going to help poor people who live in my neighborhood but they don’t seem very grateful and Northern New Jersey doesn’t look like the best place for my journey of self discovery. Right now, I’m trying to decide whether a house building project in Rio De Janeiro or well drilling program in Cape Town is better for me (I saw City of God over the weekend which was totally cool but I’m not sure if I could dig Latin chicks for six months and the beaches look better in South Africa).

Anyway I have to go, if you want to get in touch you can reach me on my landline but you might need to leave a message as I only check my voicemail once a week.

Your biggest fan
The Closer

Over the years, sales has developed its own unique language / flavor of corporate verbal diarrhea. This has served two primary purposes: to make business school graduates feel important while selling industrial powder coatings and to humanize some rather inhumane tasks such as soliciting cash from strangers. For those of you who interact with sales people, whether they be co-workers, suppliers or loved ones, here’s the definitive guide to knowing an RFP from your USP:

• Business Development – a polite term introduced by the “American Society of Door-to-Door Salesmen” to rebrand their public image after a miss-sold encyclopedia was attributed to the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident.
• Commission – a bizarre payment made to sales people for performing ordinary administrative tasks such as placing phone calls and responding to work related emails in a timely fashion.
• Cold Calling – the practice of phoning strangers with the explicit purpose of soliciting cash for products they may or may not need. A thriving business has sprung up in recent years outsourcing this type of work to federal penitentiaries and college students.
• Field Sales – derived from the WWII term “field operations”, to conduct business transactions in a hostile environment such as a client’s workplace or a Dunkin Donuts coffee shop; officially anywhere outside the pajama-clad comfort of the home office.
• Marketing – an avant-garde term first coined by Doc. Brown in “Back to the Future II” after observing futuristic business practices in 2015 such as exciting customers. Has yet to find any real acceptance in contemporary sale culture.
• On Target Earnings (OTE) – a complex calculation developed by NASA in the 1960’s to determine the annual income of a sales professional in the unlikely event that they hit their sales quota. It is a purely theoretical computation and has yet to be observed outside of a controlled laboratory environment.
• Prospect – a congenial term for someone who expresses interest in potentially purchasing a product or service. Interest can be anything from signing up for a product demonstration to accidently sneezing on a sales representative at a conference.
• Pipeline - A generally, fictitious document that details potential future business deals. Just like global warming, the further a sales pipeline projects into the future, the more it looks like a biblical prophesy.
• Puppy Dog Close – derived from the pet shop practice of letting a client take a dog / product home for the weekend on the pretense that they can bring it back if “it doesn’t all just go fine”… also works with billion dollar arms contracts.
• Quota – the magic number that nags at the back of every salesman’s psyche by totaling up exactly how many dollars they are expected to generate each year for their employer.
• Request for Proposal (RFP) – a beauty pageant type process for selecting a vendor where salesmen compete in series of elimination rounds such as karaoke, poetry recital and mud wrestling to find the most qualified supplier.
• Relationship Selling – a proven strategy that capitalizes on the correlation identified by researchers at Wharton Business School between a fuller cleavage and a more robust sales pipeline. The study coincided with the 1993 reintroduction of the Wonderbra in North America.
• Spin Selling - a highly effective sales system developed by New York crack dealers in the 1980’s based on outcome-driven questions. “If I can show you a way to get happier than you ever thought possible for only $50, is that something that you’d be interested in?”
• Unique Selling Point (USP) - the question that keeps sale people up at night the world over: “why would anyone want to buy this crap?” It is meant more as a rhetorical exercise in contemplative thinking rather than a practical business tool.

Ah, the business suit: a timeless classic.  At a first glance there isn’t too much here for the average American male to screw up.  Suits generally come in black or blue with the occasional libertine venturing out in brown.  We’re not asking anyone to pair ostrich leather shoes with dyed pink beaver fur; a navy suit, red tie and white shirt will do for 95% of business occassions.  So why do so many of us cock it up?  In the spirit of learning through the humiliation of others, let us go where no Vogue fashion critic has dared to venture since Nixon’s impeachment.  Prepare for the horror of “When Sales People Dress Badly.”

Despite widespread adoption of the automobile and advances in moving airport walkways, salesmen are still expected to “beat the pavements”.  Consequently, their footwear needs are surpassed only by the LA Lakers’ starting lineup.  Luckily there is a whole plethora of scientific innovations to get the salesman safely from his rental car to the hotel lobby: bouncing shoe spring soles, Japanese podiatric air cooling technology and Velcro for a more speedy passage through airport security.  The bottom line: if a sales rep can’t tie his own shoe laces, don’t buy from him.

And socks – how hard is it to pick a pair of socks that match approximately with the color of your slacks.  Unless your personal wealth exceeds the GDP of Guano avoid coordinating your tie and socks.  Pink silk has no place in the sweaty world of telecommunication sales especially when it comes to matching cravats and ankle-wear.  Blue suit = blue socks. Black suit = black socks.  Period. 

Socks and ties are a generally bad place for expressing our creativity.  Contemporary society offers us a whole plethora of outlets for that frustrated corporate type.  Couples sailing, spandex sportswear and BDSM conferences are all fine ways for unleashing our personal sense of individualism at the weekend.  Monday to Friday, customers want to know how much our widgets cost not why the hell we have baby blue sail boat socks peeping out of our loafers.

Accessorizing shouldn’t be that difficult either but hey we’re in sales so let’s make it unnecessarily complicated and take a 3% commission check for everyone’s troubles.  Fortunately our choices are limited to a laptop bag and some contraption for holding up our pants. 

As long as we avoid personalized belts, we’re in safe territory here but who could forget Gavin from outside sales who met every client with a giant, chrome “G” six inches above his crotch. (Initials are generally a bad idea all round – if a man needs monogrammed clothing to remember his name you probably shouldn’t be doing business with him).

Bags on the other hand are a minefield of fashion faux pas.  Rule #1: if you’re going to the gym, take a sports bag; if you heading into a boardroom leave that nylon rucksack from college behind. (Unless you sell Nike’s sporting apparel for a living and then hey kudos to you, your Christmas parties are probably a lot cooler than ours).

Among the jet set members of American Airline’s Admiral’s Club, nothing says success like a beaten Tumi leather case and a set of Million Airmiles bag tags…  they’re also closely associated with expensive divorce proceedings and kids not recognizing their workaholic parents.  It’s a bag; it holds a computer; it shouldn’t cost more than a $100.  (Editor’s Note – it is impossible to look cool with any form of wheeled laptop bag.  If you’re aiming to pick up air stewardesses while flying down to ExpoWorld09 then accept that you’ll have to ditch that wheelie bag no matter how darn smooth it rolls).

And finally the suit itself.  The rules are simple: solid navy or black – it works for Armani and it will work for you.  Get it pressed once a month, if your trousers are starting to shine and your arse could double up as a mirror, it’s time to buy a new one.  Stay away from nylon no matter what the store clerk promises.  And if you wake up with no memory of what happened at last night’s cocktail reception with your left suit sleeve missing, it’s probably time to go home.

While few people would compare the staid world of corporate sales to the free speach utopia of talk radio, both the salesman and political pundit undoubtedly rely on their vocal chords to make a living. In this article, we’ll share some insider tips from the Closer’s personal playbook and advice from a professional news reporter to ensure that we’re sat up straight, making eye contact and staying on message during our next sales call.

First up, setting the stage for a great performance: this means getting the seating arrangement right. Our choices will depend upon if we running a pitch-style meeting or a more collaborative discussion with folks from both sides of the vendor client-divide.

For a traditional pitch meeting set at a conference table, we should position ourselves between  the audience and the projector screen so our viewers can easily take in the PowerPoint presentation and our face. This positioning also allows us to spot dozing audience members and gauge how well (or OMG Bad!) the meeting is going.  Unless we have a movie trailer, quality voice we should  avoid sitting behind our audience and becoming the unseen, omnipotent voice of “My friends, now is the time to buy.”

For more collaborative type discussions (and hopefully most of our sales meetings are like this) we want to act as the anchor man taking the head of the table with our victim / client to the left and our own crack sniper / bid team to the right (or vice versa if we’re in Australia).  This seating arrangement puts us in the moderator seat meaning we can decide who does the talking  simply by staring down at the lucky individual.

Next, body language. While we could fly to Switzerland for etiquette coaching, for the price of a complementary bag of peanuts here’s all we need to know:

• To be perceived as smugly disinterested and aloof we just need to lean back 45 degrees in our seat . To make it clear that we’d rather be anywhere but here right now, slowly slide under the table for cover. Alternatively, to appear enthusiastic and engaged we just lean forward a bit. 
• Keep hands above the table at all times. Out of sight hands beg questions that we’d rather not go into here and limits the our ability to communicate. (Playback your local weatherman in slow motion to learn the Zen of non-verbal communication).
• Don’t fidget: common ticks includes bouncing up and down in our chairs, nervously fingering with wedding rings until our audience wonders if we’ve about to propose an extra-marital affair and pulling (our own) hair…the list goes on. If in doubt, go for the safety position of hands together and resting on the table favored by politicians at impeachment trials.
• Oh and don’t forget to smile… just not too much because that’s bad too. We’re aiming for something between the Buddha upon attainting enlightenment and Michael Jackson prior to cosmetic surgery.

And now onto the main event: the voice. Any sales text book will note that how we speak is often more important than what we speak about … but the same books are usually thin on the specifics of how to speak effectively. Fortunately there are just 3 variables that we need to master: tone, speed and volume. Let’s get started with tone.

If we’re trying out for a spot on National Public Radio we’d be well advised to start LoooOOOWWW. Beginning our sentences with a low tone of voice (within our normal vocal range – no need to go for Barry White here) gives us room to go up as we reach our points of stress and emphasis. If we start high and get excited, we run the risk of sounding like Woody Wood Pecker and hyperventilating in an already stressful situation. Be mellow – start low.

Speed is something we can and should control. Too fast and we sound like we have a terrible secret (“I confess! I jacked up the price like never before because I know who the competition is!”). Too slow and we’d be better off auditioning for a sleep hypnosis CD rather than selling. Most of us lean towards speaking too fast, especially when we’re stressed. For such speedy individuals, speaking more slowly gives us more time to think and instantly ups our perceived IQ score by 10 points.

We should never speed up our chatter rate just because we’re running short of time – throwing out information puts our audience in a nodding-dog, glazed eye coma.  In fact we’d be better off doing the opposite by slowing down and shortening our message for the remaining time available.

When it comes to questions, the temptation is to impress the audience by telling them everything we know as fast as we can. Not a good idea. To repeat, excessive amounts of rapid information merely shuts down a conference room like a stray can of sleeping gas.  Unless we’re Barack Obama, monologues over two minutes are not recommended.  A much better strategy is to share a little insight, solicit feedback, share a littler more info and so forth until we’ve provided just the right level of detail for our audience . Dumping vast amounts of data on prospects until they yield to a deluge of verbal diarrhea is commonly referred to as “drop your pants selling” and no one wants to be guilty of that.

And finally, volume.  As kids we’re taught to address a room LOUDLY AND CONFIDENTLY SO EVERYONE CAN HEAR US.  This isn’t bad advice but if we turn our volume down just a notch while speaking slowly and starting sentences at the low end of our vocal range, the effect is well… hypnotic. People listen to and trust a quieter voice more. It takes confidence; in the immortal words of the Guinness TV ads for that famous Irish stout, it’s all about “strong words softly spoken.”  Next time we want to make an important point, try softening the voice a pip and seeing what the reaction is.

Outside of Broadway, few careers gives us the  opportunity to explore our vocal talents like selling:  learning and knowing how to use our voice is a lot of fun.  Whether we’re pitching for a billion dollar Pentagon contract or closing a startup company’s first sale, a polished vocal talent is the great equalizer of sales. 

Until the next time:  stay low, stay melllow, don’t eat too much jello.

When it comes to selling, slothfulness is by far the deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins. You can lust after your co-worker, supersize your lunch hour till your pants explode but woe beholds the slothful sales rep: few things will put a buzz kill on your career faster than a bad case of procrastination.

Whichever bright spark first thought of hiring a man to do nothing but sell for 8 hours a day was a particularly sadistic fellow. Selling is a rather existentialist profession and who want post-modernism in their job description?

Let’s say we go to the office and absently surf the internet for a day – nothing happens, we just get a vague sense of guilt that we can’t quite put our finger on. Next we wrap up early one afternoon and make a matinee movie – again nothing really happens, is that repressed professional panic setting in or merely lunchtime indigestion? And finally, after a strangely pleasant month of not much happening we are summoned to meet our maker in the corner office.
“Turn it around, Jones or you’re out of a job by the end of the month.” At this stage we’re a match stick away from combustion on the office bonfire. Once we’re behind the numbers, sales is a paricularly unpleasant way to make a living.

And there in lies the problem. Skip a day in most professions and the proverbial doo-doo will hit the fan by 5 o’clock. Widgets don’t get delivered, beans don’t get counted, math tests don’t get graded. But in sales we reap the rewards of hard work that was anonymously sown three months ago. The trouble is at the time, we don’t know which sales calls will be the winners and which need never have been made. It’s enough to drive a man insane.

Now throw in the minimal supervision associated with home office and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Who in their right mind would want to Cold Call / Warm Call/ Power Spin Call of their own free will when they could be happily surfing eBay for discounted soft furnishings? No one would have though to put cable TV in the office ten years ago; today we’re never more than two clicks away from a million channels of entertainment, all conveniently available on our work PC.

Sales is a lot like college, work hard 9am -5pm, five days a week and you’ll graduate with decent gradse. Instead most of us choose to pull all nighters, cadge last minute favors from buddies and generally make an unnecessary ruckus of out our professional lives (German sales professionals exempted).

And it’s the little things that we consequently skip over. Not the big deal proposal but the handful of phone calls to new propsects that need to be made everyday and the 10 minutes needed to check our clients latest news. These minor acts of selling are the difference between average and stellar over a lifetime; they also make our daily work more interesting and rewarding.

This column has purposely stayed away from the self-help blurb that passes as contemporary sales literature, but for once let’s throws ourselves on Oprah’s couch. So grab that lunchtime yoga mat and get ready for a better life with “The Closer’s Guide to Kicking Procrastination.”

• Prioritize: keep the first hour of every day free for prospecting. It’s not a lot but it’s 250 hours a year more than your average account manager and that’s enough to build an empire.
• Fear is Our Friend: if it make’s us uncomfortable then it probably needs doing. Forget the moral compass; our professional bearings are oiled with the cold sweat of fear.  This also serves as a great reminder to call the in-laws from time to time.
• You’ve Got Mail: keep a pad of paper by your desk and next time you have an urge to check your Gmail just make a note on your personal to do list, then come back to it at the end of the day. “My gosh! Without all those constant distractions a monkey could do this job!  Corporate life’s funny like that sometimes.
• Self Manage:– if you had an unpaid intern which of your daily tasks would you assign to your academic debutante (includes searching eBay memorabilia) and which would you keep for yourself. Now which do you think you should be focusing on?
• Routine: as British boarding schools have proven for centuries: we’re creatures of habit. Stick to your daily routines whether you’re preparing for a big pitch, on the road or a day away from starting your vacation
• Relax: Generally it’s a bad idea to spend work time planning the weekend and weekends worrying about work. 40 hours a week is more than enough  time to be successful in sales.

Slothfulness, procrastination, OCGD (Obsessive Compulsive Googling Disorder) – call it what you like: working on stuff other than work during work hours causes work problems. “The longest journey begins with the first step”, “Never put off until tomorrow what can be done today”… whatever moto gets your mojo on… “Just Do It”

To conlude, let us cast our minds back to business folklore and the tale of the tycoon, JP Morgan who once paid $25,000 for the secret to success. After coughing up the princely sum, a small piece of paper was left in his hand that read “At the beginning of each day make a list of the things that need to be done and for the rest of the day do them”. Words wise enough to make him the richest man in America and who doesn’t want that?

“Comrade Smith, we in Corporate Purchasing have ways of getting discount. My friend, you will pay up 5% on multi-year data storage agreement.” Ah yes the socialist ideals that brought down an empire are still alive and well in the procurement department of the average Fortune 500 company.   Commoditization, 5 Year Plans, Product Harmonization Codes, a fanaticism for hand-signed documents in the age of eSignatures…. They’ve got them all.

Procurement, or Contracting as it known by old schoolers, is the final step in the sales process, and often the most frustrating. Historically deals were rarely lost at this late stage but our margins frequently got royally screwed. In today’s recession hit economy though, get a deal stuck in procurement for too long and we’re liable to lose our funding in yet another round of budget cuts.

When working with a new client, our deal sponsor is often the best source of insight / folklore on how to get a deal wrapped up. “Judging by current weather holding patterns over at HQ we’re probably looking at a 2-3 weeks to get to this signed.” Honesty is the best option when relaying this information back to our peers, nothing stinks more than our own team asking daily “are we there yet, are we there yet?”

So what’s the best way for a Closer to survive an encounter with those friendly bureaucrats in corporate sourcing? First off, realize what we can and can’t influence. In sales we talk with puritanical zeal about “working hard to make the numbers” and for many aspects of selling such as prospecting this is true. However we’re kidding ourselves if we think we can push a deal through procurement with mere work hard work; at best our influence is limited to nagging… and maybe a little street smart.

A few simple tips definitely make life easier and get deals inked quicker. First up remember who the big boy is. If our client is a multi-billion behemoth and the 8th largest economy in the world don’t plan on making too many changes to their Master Services Agreement (MSA), The more changes we make, the longer it will take to get through the legal dragon’s den. Be pragmatic and only push for amendments when they’re essential such as restrictive Non-Compete clauses. Also make sure we’re using an appropriate MSA for our business type; if we’re supplying this year’s Holiday greeting cards we probably don’t want to get landed with the contractual requirements expected of an IT company hosting sensitive client data.

Next, remember our contact in procurement, while a still sworn Red, is probably extremely busy with 10 other vendors all clamoring for their attention. Pick up the phone and ask “what can I do to make this transaction easier.” Often this mean helping out with preparing a first draft of the Statement of Work for everyone to review; we can usually complete this simple task quicker than the overworked soul in procurement and win valuable kudos points in the process too.

And finally be prepared for that dreaded last discount: procurement’s piece of the pie. Regardless of how many weeks of excruciating price negotiations have already gone on with our business sponsor it’s never too late for procurement to ask for an additional discount. Certain customers are notorious for it (a German CRM supplier springs to mind), bight your tongue and get ready to pay up… well a little bit any. Ways of protecting our margin include factoring the procurement discount into our initial pricing, sharing transparent costing data with procurement and never giving up more than 5% (any more and “you’ve been royally had my friend” as they say in London).

Once we’ve graduated from vendor scum to approved supplier it’s worth keeping on the good terms with our new friends in procurement. Sometimes the internal marketing restrictions placed on a supplier can feel like a violation of our constitutional right to freedom of speech. “Doug, did you spam our CEO? No? Then what’s this email from his admin… you naughty, naughty little boy.” Sometimes it’s better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission

Regardless of what promises are made don’t expect procurement to sell for you, the approved vendor network is usually the last place a department goes to when they’re looking for a supplier. Our best bet is to share just enough information on potential new deals to build trust without getting into a situation where we need permission to sell to our client… or even contemplate sending an email to an executive.

In summary, we can avoid a Cuban Missile crisis with these five simple tips:

• set realistic expectations on how long a deal will take to get signed
• make sure the MSA is appropriate for our business
• offer to help out with preparing the SOW
• price up front for procurement’s price discount
• keep procurement in the loop but never lose control of our internal marketing

And remember before you spend next month’s commission check, a deals not done until the paper work’s signed.

Salesmen are hated for two crimes: making cold calls and collecting commission checks.  Fortunately for our profession, at least one of the two is on the decline.

The concept of the sales bonus is quite bizarre; in no other corporate function do employees require variable compensation to perform basic tasks such as responding to email and returning phone calls. 

But no sir, I am a salesman!  Most mornings I wake with an empty glass of Veuve Clicquot in my hand, light a cigar and begin phoning through my rolodex starting with the prospect most likely to cover the next payment on my Bentley.  If only life was that simple…

Still commission checks nicely spice up otherwise dull customer interactions.  Negotiating a million dollar contract is much more fun when the individual recommending the solution personally stands to pocket enough dollars to purchase a small speed boat.

The trouble is I’ve always felt quite awkward with such an elephant sized conflict of interest in the room “Doug – go with option B – it’s great for you and I can finally pay off my wife’s credit card bill.”  I am disorientated at the thought of addressing a room of my smartly dressed peers who are all mentally calculating how much cash I am personally going to skim off this deal.

One loving prospect, who made my life hell for two years, asked in our first meeting “so what kind of crazy commission structure are you guys on over there?”  I wanted to politely inquire what color underwear he was wearing but refrained.  Predictably, we never went beyond me bidding on laborious proposals while he called back with the same predictable outcome… ad nausea. “You won’t believe it but your company came in second.  Again! Who would have thought it?”  What goes around comes around my friend.

Oh, to be a buyer for just one day, to look down with contempt upon all who come to plunder the company’s precious funds peddling their wares and value driven elixirs of differentiation.  The interesting thing is that this mercenary attitude frequently extends to our own management teams.

“Buddy, we wanted to keep you motivated this quarter, so I’m introducing this month’s Mega Ball Bonus Commission Multiplier”. The New York State lottery’s copy editor could learn something from this guy.  Thanks – I’m already amply motivated at the thought of us all losing our jobs without you adding a biblical dose of greed into the mix.

Personally, I do not believe there is any statistical correlation between variable compensation and sales performance: high salaries keep top performers – they don’t make them.  When I go to pitch against the big boys from Accenture or IBM with their functioning marketing departments, I relish the competition.  Whether you pay me 1%, 3% or 8% factored by a 1.2 President’s Club One Time Bonus, it will all have zero influence on the outcome of the deal.  I shalt go to win and slayeth the giant.  The client doesn’t care if you’re paying double commission for business signed this month or if we’re behind on our quarterly figures.  In this economic environment, decisions are made on business judgment with a healthy dash of personal trust.

The day you’re going after business to catch a flying commission check is the moment you’ll lose the deal. Who appreciates a commission check when they’re anonymously handed out by payroll to the egotistical cries of “Give me my money!”  So what’s a sales manager to do? 

No, the best bet is a discretionary bonus paid twice a year so no one jumps ship too soon.  Bonuses come from “Me to You” and I remember to say “Thank You” on my way out of the office.  If variable compensation must be offered then keep it simple and predictable.   A recent report by Dan Ariely at Duke University suggested that the higher the bonus on the table the greater the stress and the worse the employee performance.  Bizarre?  Yes.  Believable?  Absolutely… well in socialist France anyway.

So what’s a Closer to do?  Throw your up eyes to that fading motivational poster that hangs in the staff canteen and read the immortal lines.  “Love like you’ve never been heartbroken.  Dance like no one is watching. Sell like you don’t need the paycheck” Sod it, take the money… how can a man close without a Mont Blanc pen in his pocket?

For years, mankind has dreamed of beaming itself across the universe with nothing more than a few flashing lights and accompanying spooky sound effects. After an early proof of concept was successfully piloted by the producers of Star Trek in 1966, the dream was finally realized in 1995 with the launch of WebEx…. sort of.

Just like robotic housemaids, flying cars and the paperless office WebEx and its peers haven’t quite lived up to their promise of making business travel a thing of the past. Every Monday morning an army of East Coast salesmen rise at 4:30 am to make the LA flight no doubt passing their West Coast peers somewhere in skies above Kansas. Still remote meetings are an essential part of the contemporary Closer’s toolkit if not a substitute for face-to-face meetings. So when should we use this marvel of modern office technology once thought to exist only in the realm of science fiction?

Virtual meetings are great in some scenarios… and really bad in many others, most notably when we’re pitching to someone three blocks away from our office who wouldn’t agree to a face-to-face meeting. WebEx is a step backwards when dialogues that should happen in-person are scheduled online because we lack the necessary credibility or our prospect is scared that we’ll steal their office stationary.

Meetings virtually make a lot of sense when decision makers are dispersed all over the country and shaking everyone’s sweaty hand is a physical impossibility. In such situations we should still aim to attend the session from the client’s office … preferably sitting in with the Big Mac Daddy who will be making the final decision. In this scenario it’s worth getting a reliable colleague to facilitate the virtual meeting from our head office (we join in as an attendee) rather than risk hosting from the client’s PC.

WebEx is also a great tool for qualifying new opportunities when we’re deciding if they warrant physical travel. However, we should be equally wary of throwing up our virtual white boards too early in the sales cycle. Virtual meeting requests can often be perceived an invitation to 30 minutes of “Let’s Get Ready to Sell! Sell! Sell!” and no one wants that. Since excessive technology can inhibit early dialogue, first discussions are sometimes better suited to just the old dog and bone, British slang for phone.

Like all human-computer interaction, WebEx has the potential to screw up at the most inappropriate of times. As a rule of thumb, block out the 30 minutes before hosting a virtual meeting and launch the session no later than 15 minutes before the scheduled start time. Client instructions for attending the session need to be as simple and assume our virtual guests’ IT skills go no further than programming a DVD player. We also need a backup PowerPoint that can be emailed at the last minute to any participants who cannot launch the meeting.

Once the session is up and running, the natural online group dynamic is unfortunately towards a one way monologue; above 10 participants and we might as well be pitching from behind a mirrored police cell. The skill of the online presenter is to engage the audience and push for dialogue, even more so than a successful in-person discussion. If questions are the lifeblood of traditional selling then they’re the electricity that keeps the lights on in virtual presentations. Our questions are essential for two reasons: they add engagement to a comparatively dull media and provide much needed feedback in the absence of the visual cues that we rely to navigate a traditional sales meeting.

Consequently our presentation deck requires a little tweaking for online delivery.

Every slide needs at least one pre-planned question designed to solicit feedback from our audience if only to make sure they haven’t wandered off to eBay. For groups with over five participants it’s best to direct the question to a specific individual lest we encounter the classroom scene from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”. Ask an open ended question to ten people and exactly zero people will respond.

Our presentation also needs to build in slides specifically set aside just for the client to talk about their challenges. While such exploratory conversations can naturally arise in face to face meeting, unless they’re clearly signed-posted we’re unlikely to get the client’s pain point online.

WebEx can be a real inhibitor against moving forward once we’ve uncovered a real opportunity. The client has “met” us, they’ve reviewed our pitch and who can argue when they offer to get back in touch after they’ve had time to digest our materials. Or worse still “Great presentation, send it over and I’ll share it with my team” ….some day in the very distant future – the business dating equivalent of “let’s just be friends.”

In a virtual world, real next steps are critical, our online sales plan needs to have a well thought out process that moves us from online discussion to pen signing physical paper. Few deals north of $100k are inked without a warm body present in the conference room and even fewer are initiated after only one online presentation. In effect we don’t want to give everything away in our first virtual session, we need to hold back something back for a second (hopefully in-person) meeting. This smart move keeps our initial pitch short and focused while building up natural momentum towards tangible next steps.

In summary WebEx is a great tool for validating opportunities and as a stepping stone towards successful real world meetings. It can make our sales cycle more efficient with less travel to dead-end discussions but ultimately, the technology is a complement rather than a substitute for in-person selling. Next time a virtual meeting is in on our calendar, remember:

• WebEx is best used as a qualifying tool
• Keep 30 minutes clear before hosting a session
• Prepare for technological hiccups
• If you’re pitching online away from your home office ask a colleague to facilitate
• Dialogue: Every slide needs a pre-planned question
• More Dialogue: a section should be set aside just for the client to talk
• Save something for the second meeting

Until the next deal – beam me up, Scottie.

Note: The comments made here regarding WebEx apply equally to other remote meeting technologies such as Adobe Connect and Microsoft Live Meeting. Unless you’re streaming video they’re all pretty good after a little prep time to get to know their intricacies. For a comprehensive technology review see http://davidchao.typepad.com/